Today sheet metal blanking in production is still processed with mechanical means such as either shears or presses and blanking dies. These mechanical methods result in large engineering scrap quantities and/or large capital expenditures in dedicated blanking dies tooling costs as well as in storage, transportation, maintenance and repair costs for these tools. These mechanical methods are more profitable when the number of varieties of parts to be cut is small, thus resulting in fewer tool change set-up downtimes. However, in today's market where for example the number of models of vehicles is constantly increasing, the corresponding increase in number of dedicated tools makes mechanical processes more expensive and less adaptable to lean and flexible manufacturing.
Hence, there is a need for a laser cutting process that would enable the cutting of blanks without requiring expensive dedicated or part specific tooling and that would lead to improved productivity and/or an optimized production of blanks. Preferably, such a laser cutting process would be as flexible as possible, i.e., part changes could be mainly carried out by changing a CNC software part program.